9 ms·

How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding

195 points by garry 7y ago

jpkeisala 7y ago
This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?
- brianlweiner 7y ago
  Seems like it ... my experience with Algolia was fairly lukewarm -- it seemed expensive for the capabilities offered.
  - garry 7y ago
    I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high. For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster. Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service. The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    I would agree on your point here, in some ways. Algolia is a limited search; there's a lot of things you can't do on the fly (that you can in, say, SOLR). However, the onboarding (as noted) is pretty good. It's really easy to get started using it. The learning curve is much lower and so, too, are the capabilities. If you don't need those extra capabilities, you just need to get search available, it might be the right thing.
    - garry 7y ago
      Oh yes, low bar for sure. The challenge is to get it to be a high ceiling.
- jackson1442 7y ago
  Yes, though it definitely raises some valid points. If I'm picking between a few services, I'm usually going to go for the one with the best docs and onboarding experience. That seems like a given, but a lot of companies are severely lacking in those departments.
- capableweb 7y ago
  Hosted by Garry Tan, Cofounder of Posthaven where the Masterclass is hosted and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, who also just happens to have Algolia in their portfolio. Go figure.
  - garry 7y ago
    Trying to be helpful. If there are things you would rather see, happy to try to throw that on my YouTube channel too!
  - localcrisis 7y ago
    As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job. Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building. Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building. In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies. You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done. By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I. What does it take? Good marketing. It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers. Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
    - garry 7y ago
      For me, all I'm really trying to do is lift up stories and experiences that I think are superlative and noteworthy, with the hope that it helps more of those things exist. This is helpful feedback for me in that if this feels too much like advertising, I'm not doing a good enough job there. Sorry about that.
- bartkappenburg 7y ago
  And an YC company, which maybe explains the #1 position out of the blue (but maybe I’m way too cynical)
  - 7777fps 7y ago
    It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
    - dang 7y ago
      I've posted tens of thousands of comments explaining how we moderate HN, and can tell you that we're more open than ever, so I'm not sure where you got that.
      - 7777fps 7y ago
        It is clear that some stories are boosted up, and some are boosted down, and it is not clear the process those get chosen. It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies. We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
        dang 7y ago
        Trying to write comprehensive policies would end up interesting only the sorts of users who like policies, including the sort who will raise objections no matter what we do. The more policy we produce, the more objections and meta concerns they will raise, so to go down that road would be to perform a DoS attack on ourselves. It would suck limited resources away from things we can do to improve HN for the community as a whole, instead of just a vocal, litigious few. Since we're going to get criticized from this angle no matter what we do, we may as well take our lumps up front. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry—it's mostly because policy-writing is the last thing my soul cares to do, and the bureaucratic parts of this job make me grumpy. HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.
- garry 7y ago
  Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
  - throwaway3157 7y ago
    > Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical. You didn't answer OP's question, which was: > This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it? Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
    - lnanek2 7y ago
      It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: > wanting to point to things that work well Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with open source stuff.
mabbo 7y ago
Call this whatever you want, but it really feels like it's primary purpose is to sell me something, not to teach me something. And that's fine- that's something every company has to do eventually - but it doesn't feel like real HN content to me.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  i would guess that a full %50-%70 of HN content is content marketing of some sort (either for a startup or for someone's personal brand). so many prescriptions on HN but no ban on this kind of content. makes you think.
  - tylerhou 7y ago
    dang? has explicitly stated that content marketing is allowed on HN; it just has to satisfy everything else required for a post (intellectually interesting, etc.).
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      HN occasionally has interesting submarine stories. But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a submarine is only a submarine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728690 http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    - dang 7y ago
      Right, here are two things I wrote about that on days when there was time to write about that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617732
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The content has to meet certain quality standard to survive here. Most content marketing dones't, but some does, sometimes. And when it does, you may as well leave it up - per https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.
takumo 7y ago
Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS application, to enterprise sales. Nearly all features are gated behind an enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing. They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product. As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front. It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway. Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.
- redox_ 7y ago
  (Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act! The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.
  - redox_ 7y ago
    Btw, part of this pricing rework is also about removing some of the feature gating. It's an approach we've taken to really get the feature right, first releasing it to a smaller set of (larger) customers before opening it up to the whole mass.
chenlianmt 7y ago
Trying to add search features in my personal blog. Its free plan looks good enough. p.s. looks like Hacker News is using algolia for searching right now.
- dang 7y ago
  HN Search has been using Algolia for many years now.
sudhirj 7y ago
I tend to feel a little intimidated by companies that offer fantastic experiences like this, but then I keep trying to remember this: Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1. Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing. Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be successful.
- garry 7y ago
  Yes, keep in mind this is seven years of working hardcore on one problem.
- ent101 7y ago
  The landing page was, in fact, Bootstrap! https://web.archive.org/web/20130613201137/http://www.algolia.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130613201137/http://www.algoli...
- justaguyhere 7y ago
  If someone starts a Algolia or a Stripe competitor today, they have to have good user experience to even compete, isn't it? Because Stripe and Algolia have already shown what is possible.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    If you plan to compete using their feature set, then yes. But that's a terrible idea. Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons) and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is a market that would be delighted to be served at all, let alone with some polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this to be easy, do you?
softfalcon 7y ago
And if you go to their home page and try and click on "Developers" in the navigation bar, nothing will happen... You have to click on one of the other links that actually shows a correct hover icon and THEN click on the "Developers" link to get there. Maybe their docs are great, but a bunch of links on the main site are broken...
- redox_ 7y ago
  Oh that's weird, a dropdown menu should appear and give you access to a list of developer resources :/
dhruvkar 7y ago
I see a lot of comments here deriding this as an ad for Algolia. With all the conflicts of interest, that may well be true. However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed-minded. Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do. The over-the-top cynicism seems unnecessary.
andygcook 7y ago
Meta question: @garry - Do you have a post on the your video making process and what equipment you're using? Would be curious to know if you're mostly making these videos all yourself or if you hired a video production agency to help with the recording, editing, etc. Thanks!
wenbin 7y ago
I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index). Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api! But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.
- Redsquare 7y ago
  How did you come to that conclusion?
- tschellenbach 7y ago
  There is some truth to this, API pricing is difficult. Hard to make it work for every use case.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
My experience (target is small teams) – Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though) – Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons, screenshots, videos – Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to search/navigate, also acts as good SEO – Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and go – Quick support that can get technical enough – Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features your users picked you for. Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers. (But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.
rcgorton 7y ago
Blah Blah Blah. My startup is better than the rest (pun intended) of the entire universe claims XXX. Such narcissistic (Trump level) drivel.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
Looking at the docs at 4:37 (https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277 https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277), I'd suggest they add Elixir and Rust as options!
- aseure 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm maintaining the Java/Scala/C#/Go API clients at Algolia. Exilir and Rust would indeed be great additions to our integrations. However, we are really cautious when considering to support new languages. As said in the interview, we try to provide those API clients in the most idiomatic way for each language. At the moment, we do not have a lot of demands for those languages nor the necessary workforce to onboard on those two languages (only very few people are proficient with those languages at Algolia and we don't have any production code using them IIRC).
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    Sure, I understand. It was a purely selfish request since 100% of my production code is currently Elixir and I'm also interested in Rust. Can't blame a dev for being drawn to newer languages!

195 points by garry 7y ago

jpkeisala 7y ago

This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

brianlweiner 7y ago
Seems like it ... my experience with Algolia was fairly lukewarm -- it seemed expensive for the capabilities offered.
- garry 7y ago
  I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high. For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster. Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service. The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  I would agree on your point here, in some ways. Algolia is a limited search; there's a lot of things you can't do on the fly (that you can in, say, SOLR). However, the onboarding (as noted) is pretty good. It's really easy to get started using it. The learning curve is much lower and so, too, are the capabilities. If you don't need those extra capabilities, you just need to get search available, it might be the right thing.
  - garry 7y ago
    Oh yes, low bar for sure. The challenge is to get it to be a high ceiling.
jackson1442 7y ago
Yes, though it definitely raises some valid points. If I'm picking between a few services, I'm usually going to go for the one with the best docs and onboarding experience. That seems like a given, but a lot of companies are severely lacking in those departments.
capableweb 7y ago
Hosted by Garry Tan, Cofounder of Posthaven where the Masterclass is hosted and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, who also just happens to have Algolia in their portfolio. Go figure.
- garry 7y ago
  Trying to be helpful. If there are things you would rather see, happy to try to throw that on my YouTube channel too!
- localcrisis 7y ago
  As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job. Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building. Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building. In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies. You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done. By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I. What does it take? Good marketing. It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers. Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
  - garry 7y ago
    For me, all I'm really trying to do is lift up stories and experiences that I think are superlative and noteworthy, with the hope that it helps more of those things exist. This is helpful feedback for me in that if this feels too much like advertising, I'm not doing a good enough job there. Sorry about that.
bartkappenburg 7y ago
And an YC company, which maybe explains the #1 position out of the blue (but maybe I’m way too cynical)
- 7777fps 7y ago
  It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
  - dang 7y ago
    I've posted tens of thousands of comments explaining how we moderate HN, and can tell you that we're more open than ever, so I'm not sure where you got that.
    - 7777fps 7y ago
      It is clear that some stories are boosted up, and some are boosted down, and it is not clear the process those get chosen. It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies. We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
      - dang 7y ago
        Trying to write comprehensive policies would end up interesting only the sorts of users who like policies, including the sort who will raise objections no matter what we do. The more policy we produce, the more objections and meta concerns they will raise, so to go down that road would be to perform a DoS attack on ourselves. It would suck limited resources away from things we can do to improve HN for the community as a whole, instead of just a vocal, litigious few. Since we're going to get criticized from this angle no matter what we do, we may as well take our lumps up front. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry—it's mostly because policy-writing is the last thing my soul cares to do, and the bureaucratic parts of this job make me grumpy. HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.
garry 7y ago
Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
- throwaway3157 7y ago
  > Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical. You didn't answer OP's question, which was: > This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it? Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
  - lnanek2 7y ago
    It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: > wanting to point to things that work well Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with open source stuff.

mabbo 7y ago

Call this whatever you want, but it really feels like it's primary purpose is to sell me something, not to teach me something. And that's fine- that's something every company has to do eventually - but it doesn't feel like real HN content to me.

throwlaplace 7y ago
i would guess that a full %50-%70 of HN content is content marketing of some sort (either for a startup or for someone's personal brand). so many prescriptions on HN but no ban on this kind of content. makes you think.
- tylerhou 7y ago
  dang? has explicitly stated that content marketing is allowed on HN; it just has to satisfy everything else required for a post (intellectually interesting, etc.).
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    HN occasionally has interesting submarine stories. But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a submarine is only a submarine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728690 http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - dang 7y ago
    Right, here are two things I wrote about that on days when there was time to write about that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617732
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The content has to meet certain quality standard to survive here. Most content marketing dones't, but some does, sometimes. And when it does, you may as well leave it up - per https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.

takumo 7y ago

Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS application, to enterprise sales. Nearly all features are gated behind an enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing. They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product. As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front. It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway. Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.

redox_ 7y ago
(Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act! The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.
- redox_ 7y ago
  Btw, part of this pricing rework is also about removing some of the feature gating. It's an approach we've taken to really get the feature right, first releasing it to a smaller set of (larger) customers before opening it up to the whole mass.

chenlianmt 7y ago

Trying to add search features in my personal blog. Its free plan looks good enough. p.s. looks like Hacker News is using algolia for searching right now.

dang 7y ago
HN Search has been using Algolia for many years now.

sudhirj 7y ago

I tend to feel a little intimidated by companies that offer fantastic experiences like this, but then I keep trying to remember this: Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1. Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing. Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be successful.

garry 7y ago
Yes, keep in mind this is seven years of working hardcore on one problem.
ent101 7y ago
The landing page was, in fact, Bootstrap! https://web.archive.org/web/20130613201137/http://www.algolia.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130613201137/http://www.algoli...
justaguyhere 7y ago
If someone starts a Algolia or a Stripe competitor today, they have to have good user experience to even compete, isn't it? Because Stripe and Algolia have already shown what is possible.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  If you plan to compete using their feature set, then yes. But that's a terrible idea. Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons) and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is a market that would be delighted to be served at all, let alone with some polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this to be easy, do you?

softfalcon 7y ago

And if you go to their home page and try and click on "Developers" in the navigation bar, nothing will happen... You have to click on one of the other links that actually shows a correct hover icon and THEN click on the "Developers" link to get there. Maybe their docs are great, but a bunch of links on the main site are broken...

redox_ 7y ago
Oh that's weird, a dropdown menu should appear and give you access to a list of developer resources :/

dhruvkar 7y ago

I see a lot of comments here deriding this as an ad for Algolia. With all the conflicts of interest, that may well be true. However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed-minded. Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do. The over-the-top cynicism seems unnecessary.

andygcook 7y ago

Meta question: @garry - Do you have a post on the your video making process and what equipment you're using? Would be curious to know if you're mostly making these videos all yourself or if you hired a video production agency to help with the recording, editing, etc. Thanks!

wenbin 7y ago

I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index). Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api! But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.

Redsquare 7y ago
How did you come to that conclusion?
tschellenbach 7y ago
There is some truth to this, API pricing is difficult. Hard to make it work for every use case.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

My experience (target is small teams) – Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though) – Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons, screenshots, videos – Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to search/navigate, also acts as good SEO – Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and go – Quick support that can get technical enough – Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features your users picked you for. Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers. (But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.

rcgorton 7y ago

Blah Blah Blah. My startup is better than the rest (pun intended) of the entire universe claims XXX. Such narcissistic (Trump level) drivel.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

Looking at the docs at 4:37 (https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277 https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277), I'd suggest they add Elixir and Rust as options!

aseure 7y ago
Disclaimer: I'm maintaining the Java/Scala/C#/Go API clients at Algolia. Exilir and Rust would indeed be great additions to our integrations. However, we are really cautious when considering to support new languages. As said in the interview, we try to provide those API clients in the most idiomatic way for each language. At the moment, we do not have a lot of demands for those languages nor the necessary workforce to onboard on those two languages (only very few people are proficient with those languages at Algolia and we don't have any production code using them IIRC).
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Sure, I understand. It was a purely selfish request since 100% of my production code is currently Elixir and I'm also interested in Rust. Can't blame a dev for being drawn to newer languages!